Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7)
Launch Date
July 21, 1961
Craft
Mercury
Status
Past
Crew
1
Mercury-Redstone 4 (Liberty Bell 7)
Launch Date
July 21, 1961
Craft
Mercury
Status
Past
Crew
1
Overview
The second U.S. suborbital human spaceflight largely repeated the success of Freedom 7. The 15-minute flight ended with a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean and a harrowing rescue of Grissom, the single crewmember, after a malfunction blew the hatch off and caused the capsule to sink. Some within NASA thought Grissom panicked and activated the emergency systems. Grissom maintained it was a malfunction. Liberty Bell 7 was eventually recovered in 1999, proving Grissom was correct.
Crafts
Mercury
The Mercury capsule was the United States' first human spacecraft. Built without onboard computers, all flight calculations had to be determined on the ground and radioed up to each crew member. The spacecraft performed two suborbital and four orbital human missions and proved that people could live in space for multiple days.
